Privacy Policy

Who we are and what this policy covers

Tab Marshal is tournament software for collegiate mock trial, operated by Colin Coleman (“Tab Marshal”, “we”, “us”). This policy covers tabmarshal.app, the admin site at admin.tabmarshal.app, the tab room, the team portal and the public pairings screens (together, the “Service”).

Two parties decide what happens to information in Tab Marshal:

• The tournament. A tournament’s directors, and the staff they add, decide which teams, students, judges and ballots go into their tournament and when pairings and results are published. For this tournament data we act on the tournament’s behalf, as its service provider. Questions about a tournament’s data are best sent to its directors, and we will help them answer.
• Tab Marshal. We decide how sign-in, security and the Service itself work. For staff sign-in information, technical data and messages you send us, we are responsible for the information.

Tab Marshal is independent software. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the American Mock Trial Association or any other mock trial association.

Information we collect

Most of what Tab Marshal holds is entered by a tournament’s staff to run that tournament. The rest is what sign-in and delivering web pages need.

When staff import a spreadsheet, the file is read in their browser and only the columns they match (names, and for judges any contact details) are sent to us.

We do not ask for students’ dates of birth, student ID numbers, grades or contact details, and we do not collect payment details, government ID numbers or precise location. Judge notes and other free-text fields hold whatever staff type, so tournaments should keep sensitive information out of them.

Signing in with Google

Staff can sign in to the tab room and the admin site with a Google account. Sign-in runs through Cloudflare Access, which asks Google only for the basic scopes openid, email and profile.

• What Google shares: your email address, name, profile picture and a Google account identifier. Google does not share your password. We cannot see your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, contacts or any other Google data.
• What we use: your email address, and nothing else. We match it against the tournament staff lists to decide which tournaments you may open, and we record it in a tournament’s activity log beside each change you make. Your name and picture stay with Cloudflare Access, which keeps a record of who has signed in.
• What we don’t do: we do not sell Google user data, use it for advertising, use it to train artificial intelligence models, or let anyone read it except to run sign-in, secure the Service or comply with the law. We share it only with Cloudflare, to run sign-in, and as the law requires.
• Removing access: you can remove Tab Marshal from your Google Account at any time, under Security, in the list of third-party connections. That stops Google sign-in; it does not take you off a staff list. Ask a director or us for that.

Tab Marshal’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

You don’t need a Google account. You can sign in instead with a one-time code that Cloudflare emails to the address on the staff list.

How we use information

We use information only to run tournaments and the Service that runs them:

• Running tournaments: pairings, judge assignments, ballot tabulation, standings, individual awards, pairing cards and the team portal.
• Controlling access: deciding who may sign in and which tournaments each person may open, and keeping Cloudflare’s sign-in list in step with the staff lists.
• Understanding use: counting visits to our pages, and where they come from, in aggregate, so we can see what is used and fix what is slow. We do not use these statistics to identify, profile or advertise to anyone.
• Keeping a record: the activity log, so a tournament can explain any result or change after the awards.
• Reading ballots: sending ballot photos to our AI provider when staff scan them (see Ballot reading with AI).
• Security and support: stopping code guessing and misuse, and investigating a problem a tournament reports, including the feedback reports sent with the Send feedback link. Only Tab Marshal’s administrator sees those reports.
• Talking to you: answering messages, and telling directors and staff about changes to the Service or these policies.
• The law: meeting legal obligations and responding to lawful requests.

Pairings, judge assignments and standings are calculated automatically from the rules the tournament chooses. The tournament’s staff review them and decide what to publish.

We do not sell or rent personal information, share it for targeted advertising, build profiles of people, or use tournament data to train AI models.

What is public, and who sees what

A tournament’s directors choose when each round’s pairings are published and when final results are released. Before pairings are published, the pairings screen shows only the tournament’s name. The team portal’s sign-in page publicly lists the names and dates of upcoming and current tournaments and those ended in the last 14 days.

Judges’ contact details, availability, check-in times, notes and conflicts are never shown on public pages or in the team portal.

Service providers

We use these providers to run Tab Marshal. Each receives only what its job needs, under its own terms and privacy policy.

We may also disclose information:

• when the law requires it, such as a valid subpoena or court order;
• to protect the safety, rights or property of people using the Service, the public or Tab Marshal;
• to a successor if Tab Marshal is transferred, reorganized or sold, under this policy, with notice to directors first;
• with the consent of the people it is about, or at a tournament’s direction.

Ballot reading with AI

Staff can photograph or upload paper ballots instead of typing them. Each ballot photo is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API, which reads the scores, the header, the written totals and the individual awards.

• What is sent: the photo of the ballot, the names on both teams’ rosters, and the names of the case’s witnesses, so handwritten names can be matched to the right student.
• Competitive results: a reading waits for a staff member to check it against the paper ballot before it counts toward competitive results. If the director selects immediate provisional release, scores entered or reviewed by staff can show pending win/loss/tie before second-person verification; pending rounds are excluded from displayed cumulative figures.
• At Anthropic: under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs after a limited period, unless it must keep them longer to enforce its usage policies or comply with the law.
• At Tab Marshal: we keep the photo and the reading with the tournament, for as long as we keep the rest of its data.

A tournament that prefers not to send ballots to an AI service can type every ballot in by hand. Scanning is never required.

Cookies and browser storage

Tab Marshal uses no advertising cookies and nothing that follows you to other sites. Its visit statistics (Cloudflare Web Analytics) work without cookies or browser storage. It uses the following sign-in cookies, depending on which part of the Service you use.

Cloudflare may also set cookies it needs to protect the site from automated attacks. The sign-in cookies are needed for the Service to work, so there is no setting to turn them off. Because we don’t track you across sites, there is nothing for Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signals to switch off.

How long we keep information

We keep a tournament’s data so its results can be explained after the awards, then delete it.

We check for expired tournaments daily and delete their records and ballot photos 24 calendar months after the last day. If a tournament has no end date, we use its start date; if neither date is set, we use the day it was created. Directors can ask us to delete a tournament earlier.

Demo workspaces. An administrator records a session name, their own account email, its start and expiry time, and the chosen fictional tournament state. Passwords and browser sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes. Demo access ends after three hours or sooner if the host ends it. Workspace records, visitor edits and sign-in records are deleted by scheduled cleanup, normally within five minutes of expiry; failed cleanup is retried. Resetting a demo deletes its previous state. Use fictional information only. Live ballot scanning and feedback uploads are unavailable in demos. Anonymous activity records are removed during demo cleanup. Cloudflare recovery history may retain deleted database data for its configured recovery window.

When a tournament is deleted, we anonymize its activity records by removing staff identities, the tournament identifier and all detail text. We retain only when each action happened and the type of action, including the deletion itself; these anonymous records have no fixed retention period. The same anonymization applies to records left by earlier tournament deletions.

Deleted data can stay in our database provider’s recovery history for up to 30 days before it is gone for good. We may keep information longer when the law requires it, or to resolve a dispute we have been told about.

Security

We protect information with these measures:

• Every page and request is encrypted in transit (HTTPS), and Cloudflare encrypts stored data at rest.
• The tab room and the admin site sit behind Cloudflare Access. Only people on a tournament’s staff list can sign in, and each sees only the tournaments they are on. Removing someone closes the tournament to them at once, even mid-session.
• Team portal codes are stored only as salted PBKDF2 hashes, and sign-in tokens only as SHA-256 hashes, so a copy of the database cannot be used to sign in. Team portal sign-in is protected against guessing.
• Ballot photos are served only to signed-in staff of their tournament. The marked copy of a ballot’s photo is also served to the signed-in captain of a team in that trial, and only once the tournament shows that team its ballots.
• Every change in a tournament is logged with who made it and when.
• Keys and tokens are kept as encrypted secrets, never in the code.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will notify the affected tournaments and people as the law requires. Please report security problems to info@tabmarshal.app.

Your choices and rights

You can ask to see the information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or get a copy. Send the request to info@tabmarshal.app.

• Staff and directors: we handle your sign-in information directly. A director or the administrator can take you off a tournament’s list at any time.
• Students, judges and others named in a tournament: the tournament controls that data, so we pass your request to its directors and help them act on it. You can also contact the directors yourself.
• Checking it’s you: we may ask you to confirm the request from the email address we hold, or to give details only you would know.
• Timing: we answer within 30 days, and tell you if we need longer, up to the time the law allows.
• Limits: we may keep information the law requires us to keep, or that a tournament needs to settle a dispute it has told us about. We will say what we kept and why.

We will not treat you differently for making a request.

United States residents. Some state laws, such as California’s, give residents these rights. We honor them for everyone, wherever they live. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those laws define those terms.

European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland. We rely on legitimate interests to run tournaments that organizers ask us to run and to keep the Service secure, on contract to provide the Service to tournaments, and on legal obligations where they apply. You may also object to our use of your information, ask us to restrict it, and complain to your data protection authority.

Students, minors and school records

Tab Marshal is built for collegiate competition and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we will delete it.

If a tournament includes competitors under 18, its organizers are responsible for any permission from parents or guardians that their rules, their schools or the law require before entering those competitors’ names.

Tab Marshal is not run by or for any school, and it keeps tournament records for the tournament, not for a school. A school whose policies protect student names or competition results should confirm it may share them before its teams’ rosters are entered.

Where data is stored

Tab Marshal stores data with Cloudflare in the United States. Pages are delivered from Cloudflare’s servers nearest to you, and our other providers may process data in the United States. If you use Tab Marshal from outside the United States, your information is transferred there.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we post the new version here with a new effective date. For a significant change, we tell directors and staff by email or in the tab room at least 14 days before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions, requests and security reports: info@tabmarshal.app